News behind the news. This picture is me (white spot) standing on the bridge connecting European and North American tectonic plates. It is located in the Reykjanes area of Iceland. By-the-way, this is a color picture.

Tag Archives: Second Temple

Yesterday John Hinderaker at Power Line posted a story about a proposed UNESCO resolution regarding Israel. The resolution is further evidence that the United Nations has lost its way as a peace-keeping organization and has become an outlet for antisemitism around the world.

The article reports:

The United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a draft resolution on Thursday that failed to acknowledge the Jewish people’s ties to the Temple Mount, raising ire in Israel.

The proposal “strongly condemns the Israeli escalating aggressions and illegal measures against the Waqf Department and its personnel, and against the freedom of worship and Muslims’ access to their Holy Site Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al Sharif, and requests Israel, the Occupying Power, to respect the historic Status Quo and to immediately stop these measures.”

It omits the Jewish name for the holy site—the Temple Mount—and instead refers to it only by its Muslim name—Al-Haram Al Sharif.

One of the things that happened after the 1967 war was that Israel allowed religious people access to their religious sites. Under Muslim rule, that does not happen–Christian churches and Jewish synagogues are destroyed when Muslims control a country along with historic artifacts.

Currently, one of the strongest voting blocs in the United Nations is the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. This bloc is made up of a number of nations that support a worldwide caliphate, Sharia Law, and the destruction of Israel. As long as this bloc is a major player, the United Nations cannot function as an organization working toward world peace.

David conquered the Jebusites and captured Jerusalem 3,000 years ago. Jerusalem has been the center of Jewish life and worship ever since. Herod the Great raised the Second Temple, where Jesus taught and, according to the Gospels, drove out the money-changers. Jesus was arrested, tried and executed in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple following the Jewish rebellion not long thereafter. Jews have lived in Jerusalem, and sought to return there from around the world, for millennia. Muslims arrived in the area roughly 1,600 years after the Jews, on the most charitable interpretation of history.

Temple Mount is exactly that–the site of the Second Temple, for sure, and perhaps, as tradition records, the location of Solomon’s temple and, long before that, the place where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. To suggest that Temple Mount has no historical connection to the Jewish people, and the modern state of Israel, is ridiculous–precisely the sort of absurdism that international leftists, and especially Arabs, engage in. It would be like claiming that Washington, D.C. has no connection to the American people, only worse, by 2,750 years or so.

The Israeli government has gone to the length of issuing a publication detailing the millennia-long relationship between the Jewish people and the Promised Land. I admire the Israelis’ patience, but in their shoes, I think I would tell the lunatics–the UNESCO resolution was sponsored by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, and supported by any number of Europeans–to get stuffed.

It is truly time for the United States to leave the United Nations and to evict them from their New York City headquarters. One of my daughters suggested that they might leave voluntarily if we forced them to pay all of the diplomats’ parking tickets. I think that is a really good idea.